Emergency Management for Transportation in Northwest Indiana

Emergency Management is essential to provide services to those in need during an emergency situation. In Northwest Indiana, the Emergency Management Agency (EMA) is developing a Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan (CEMP) for District 1, which is Northwest Indiana. District 1 in the State of Indiana includes the counties: Lake, Porter, Newton, LaPorte, and Jasper (Indiana Homeland Security District 1, 2013). The CEMP consists of Emergency Support Functions (ESFs). The main focus of this thesis is to complete Task #1 under Response Tasks, “Activate SOPs or guidelines for emergency operations that consider: The assessment, staging, use, status, and sustainability of facilities, equipment, supplies, and other resources. The assessment and status of roadways, bridges, and other critical infrastructure. The alert, notification and activation of personnel for work in the field or within the MACC. Emergency communications and reporting procedures” (Indiana Homeland Security District 1, 2013). MACC represents Multiagency Coordination Center. This task is under the Emergency Support Function #1: Transportation. In order to answer this task, the first step is to conduct a theoretical framework for decision making for the EMA in Northwest Indiana. This framework will allow the EMA and its emergency responders to follow certain steps depending on the type, location, and even the possible effects of the disaster. Also, to answer Task #1, traffic simulation models were created using PTV Vision Vissim® to compare everyday traffic to traffic during any type of disaster, whether it is a snow storm, or a mass flood, which is where the engineering applies to this thesis. Vissim is a traffic simulation program that offers the users to simulate traffic patterns exactly how they are in the real world (PTV Group). Using these real world traffic simulation models, everyday traffic can be compared to scenarios with different natural disasters to see how the traffic is affected. By considering two scenarios involving a flooding situation and severe snow conditions, simulations were made and compared with regular patterns to study the effectiveness of emergency planning in Northwest Indiana